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Technology Stocks : WCOM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mike thomas who wrote (11372)	7/22/2002 8:47:34 AM
From: John Curtis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

Mike: ..Now, if one of the bells has a couple hundred bucks, they will all go back together. Who wins? Damned if I know but it sure wasn't me... LOL! Well, to my mind two aspects won what appears to be a ~20 year circle from "Ma Bell" to complete divestiture and CLEC chaos back to....big regional "Ma Bells." First, the ILEC's (formerly known as the Baby Bells), by benefit of being part of the players managing to remain on their feet these past 20 years, have won. Secondly, and a much overlooked aspect to these past 20 years, is rapid innovation and deployment of new technology won it for everyone. How so? Well...if you can remember the days of "Ma," then you know how reluctant she was to have a consumer slap an OEM telephone on the end of "Ma's" twisted pair, much less think about quickly providing any application that was radically sophisticated. Innovation in those days was a much....err...controlled aspect to the over-arching monopoly. And to a certain extent you can continue to see it today from the Baby's, and I point to xDSL's rather sloow penetration when juxtaposed against how long the technology has been available, by way of an example. Also, I daresay this very thing by which you and I are now communicating, the Internet, would probably not exist in this form. Hell...if it existed it might still be a University/R&D/think-tank novelty. IMHO, of course. So yes, there have been losers in this 20 year telecom cycle. And the pain for these losers, their shareholders and peers, will probably be manifested for years. But to my mind, taking the long view, the benefits have outweighed the pain. Speaking of pain, now let's see how the slicing and dicing of the WCOM corpse proceeds. How's this for a post-BK, phoenix-like resurrection, name for the company.....Worldnet? John~